The current tastes of consumers are increasingly oriented towards a low-fat diet. To this end, there has been developed, in the last 20 years, a wide variety of products for everyday consumption based on direct or reversed emulsion of the margarine, salad dressing or mayonnaise type and the like in which the concentration of fat is considerably reduced in favour of that of water. This has involved the parallel development of stabilizing and/or emulsifying systems capable of conferring the required stability on these emulsions.
Among the emulsifying agents conventionally used, there may be mentioned more particularly egg protein extracts, sodium caseinates and powdered skim milks.
All these agents are characterized by a high protein content which probably improves their emulsifying behaviour. For this reason, their use is very common.
This has led to the more recent development of new emulsifying agents, of non-animal origin and having an equivalent or even superior emulsifying behaviour.